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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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An invalid 68030 instruction accidentally allowed the Mac Classic II to boot
This is the story of how Apple made a mistake in the ROM of the Macintosh Classic II that probably should have prevented it from booting, but instead, miraculously, its Motorola MC68030 CPU accidentally prevented a crash and saved the day by executing an undefined instruction.
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Morse Code in Tubular Bells (2021)
A quick look at how the movie The Exorcist from 1973 has links to the late great Alan Turing via Mike Oldfield’s album Tubular Bells, Scotland and Amateur Radio. It’s Halloween so figured why not throw some horror in the mix.
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The British Micro Behemoth
Or, how a precocious youth briefly conquered the UK
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Using generative AI as part of historical research: three case studies
... in specific domains. Three case studies with GPT-4o, o1, and Claude Sonnet 3.5, and what they mean
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It's time to make computing personal again
Adventures in vintage computers and retrogaming. Includes articles on classic games and obsolete computers.
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Hacking the Yamaha DX9 to Turn It into a DX7 (2023)
A brief account of hacking the Yamaha DX9's firmware ROM to make its functionality more closely match the DX7.
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The "35-cent" Commodore 64 softmodem
Rockwell famously used 6502-based cores in modems for many years, but that doesn't mean other 6502s couldn't be used. If only there were a w...
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How Unix spell ran in 64kb RAM
How do you fit a dictionary in 64kb RAM? Unix engineers solved it with clever data structures and compression tricks. Here's the fascinating story behind it.
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Garmin's –$40B Pivot
The GPS pioneer took direct hits from Apple (iPhone, Watch) and Google (Maps). But huge R&D investment helped turn the company from an automotive GPS firm to a leader in fitness watches and trackers.
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Brood War Korean Translations
As work slowed down during the last couple of weeks of 2024, I decided to redirect some of my energy to hobbies instead of work. One such hobby is StarCraft: Brood War (or BW for short), a classic, highly competitive RTS from '98 that still has an active community today.
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The Family Bass - Music with an NES
I connected a Family BASIC keyboard to an NES via a bespoke adapter in order to play its unique triangle waveform live.
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2k-year-old wine and the uncanny immediacy of the past
Why artifacts like the Carmona Wine Urn, the Pazyryk Rug, and the Sword of Goujian are so important
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A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet
The emerging importance of the find underscores a key truth about archaeology: artifacts often hold secrets that only later generations can unlock.
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Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes
Everything put into the building that is unnecessary, every cubic foot that is used for purely ornamental purposes beyond that needed to express its use and to make it harmonize with others of its class, is a waste — is, to put it in plain English, perverting someone’s money — George Hill, commercial real estate…
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Why the Getty Center Is the Safest Place for Art During a Fire (2019)
Visit our Los Angeles museums and library, interact with art, and access free research tools.
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Mac Mini G4 – The best « classic » Macintosh for retro-gaming?
The Mac Mini G4 promises to be compatible with almost every Macintosh software released until the early 2000s. This article explains why and puts the machine to the test.
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The Chaos (1922)
This is a classic English poem containing about 800 of the worst irregularities in English spelling and pronunciation. Will Snellen wrote a PDF version using the phonetic alphabet . You can hear some of it pronounced mostly correctly in videos here:
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Railroad Tycoon II
Like a lot of boys, I grew up loving trains. And like a lot of men, I retain my fascination for them today.
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A swashbuckling tale of Italian software piracy – 1983-1993 (2022)
The history of Italian software piracy from 1983 to 1993, retail shops & national distribution: how cracked games were sold as legitimate.
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Parsing the C64 Bubble Bobble Wind Currents
This would be my website, I guess.
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Standard Ebooks Public Domain Day 2025 in Literature
Read about the new ebooks Standard Ebooks is releasing for Public Domain Day 2025!
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Morris Chang and the Origins of TSMC
Book review of the autobiography of Morris Chang.
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I thought I found a bug
So I was working on improving a DOS emulator, when I found that something seemingly trivial wasn’t working right when COMMAND.COM was asked to do the following:
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Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
a perfectly miserable son of a gun builds Silicon Valley
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Masks, Smoke, and Mirrors: The story of EgyptAir flight 804
In 2016, an EgyptAir A320 spiraled into the Mediterranean, killing 66 people. Was it an act of sabotage, or something even scarier?
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1584 LAN party photos from 1996 – 2010 from Australia's island state archived
In July 2023 I was reminiscing about a thing of the past, large-scale public LAN parties. I remember them being a semiregular occurrence around Tasmania, only attending a couple in my young age before they disappeared. I wondered if I could find some photos of these events to help the memories come back clearer. After…